Sick Pilgrim’s Regress

Jonathan Ryan is a Catholic convert, writer, and co-founder of the Patheos blog titled Sick Pilgrim, which describes itself as “a space for the spiritually sick, and their fellow travelers, to rest a while.”

We must incarnate in the world and be a part of its pain and redemption, even if it means we could lose our way from time to time. This all sounds dangerous. It most certainly is. But that’s the call of Christ–not a call to “protect Western Civilization” or “Christian culture,” but a call to risk it all for the sake of the redemption of the world. We must risk our children as we teach them to engage with sinners like themselves. We must risk our self respect, our reputations, and everything we hold dear.

This can’t be done via the Benedict Option. It’s not possible. Dreher’s ideas aren’t just bad, they’re dangerous to the soul–because they’ll keep us from our most important call as Christians, to Christ by loving others. When we avoid that call, we avoid the only possible way to transform ourselves and the culture around us: the radical love of Christ’s suffering.

Well. On another Patheos blog, Sick Pilgrim co-founder Jessica Mesman Griffith released a statement that begins like this:

This is my official statement. You should hear it from me. You’ve become like family to me. I can only say I’m sorry I didn’t speak out sooner as maybe it would have spared others some pain. #metoo indeed.

On Sunday, November 12, 2017, it came to my attention that there have been relationships between Jonathan Ryan, the co-founder of the Sick Pilgrim blog, and various women in the Sick Pilgrim online community–a community that had become, over the last year, a de facto support group for those recovering from spiritual abuse, in addition to a place for artists and writers to come together to discuss what inspires us and/or troubles us about the Catholic Church. (This Facebook community is a private group–one must request to join–but it’s not a secret. We have advertised it on the blog and on Facebook multiple times and invited anyone interested to send us a request to join.)

It quickly became apparent, upon investigation of these claims, that the relationships Jonathan had formed with several women he met through the blog and in the community had in fact been inappropriate, predatory and exploitative.

By Tuesday, November 14, the Sick Pilgrim administrative staff had collected enough testimony and evidence to send Jonathan a formal letter notifying him that he had been removed from the online community and should no longer publish any work or give interviews or public lectures under the name Sick Pilgrim.

And more:

He private messaged women in the group with romantic intent, making plans or suggesting to meet with more than one of them in person. At least one has reported that when he met her in person, they had sexual intercourse.

This woman was (1) a good deal younger than him; (2) struggling openly (as narrated in the group) with mental illness; (3) in extremely stressful life, financial, and relational transition, and thus (4) quite obviously vulnerable. The power and position dynamics were simply inexcusable and unconscionable. We have evidence that he indicated to this younger woman that she could expect marriage–going so far as to pick out the chapel where they were to be wed–and that intercourse was part of that trajectory. Even if, at the time, this intercourse was consensual, the woman in question gave her consent under false pretenses.
Again, the power and trust differential was severely abused.

Here is a detailed account by Donna Provencher of what she alleges is a manipulative sexual relationship she had with Jonathan Ryan Weyer. Read it; it’s emotionally and psychologically sick stuff.

But for those expecting “Strange Journey” to be a book about rebellion, they may be surprised to find it focuses more on renewal.

“The church can often get seduced by power, money and control instead of truth, beauty and love,” Weyer said. “And, as a faithful son of the church, I wanted to tell people my story with the hope they would see the mystery of faith is far more attractive than a half-baked program that will quickly become obsolete.”

And:

“All of our spiritual journeys are strange and take many twisted turns. We’re both Catholic because it is strange, it is unsettling and it does take a lifetime to learn, to grow, to heal and become whole,” Weyer said. “Our journeys aren’t over. It’s a process of opening doors only to discover a room full of more doors. That can be frustrating. It can also be comforting. We aren’t expected to get it right all the time. God is mercy.”

Sick Pilgrim showed him the door this week. Weyer is on the staff at a Catholic church as a “pastoral associate for evangelization.” Bet he’s going to be shown the door there too.

I don’t post this as someone gloating over the fall of a critic. I don’t gloat at all. The things he has been accused of doing are disgusting, and thought I am glad it has been exposed, it shouldn’t have happened at all.

I post this, rather, to make a point about the Benedict Option and the sinful world. Now, as I said, Ryan’s cartoonish version of the Ben Op is not what I wrote in the book. There is no utopia. There is no place to escape completely the brokenness of the world. If you think there is, you are setting yourself up for a disaster. Sin is our common curse. What the Ben Op intends to do is to create thick communities of Christian education, formation, and practice that can anchor its members in orthodox Christianity in the post-Christian world. The goal is not to create a perfect community (which isn’t possible), but a faithfully Christian one. When serious sin — like what has happened in the Sick Pilgrim community — occurs, the community deals with it firmly and justly. This too is part of Christian formation.

Humans being humans, you will find people like Ryan in intentionally Ben Op communities. You will obviously find them outside them too. It is interesting to notice how Ryan, a divorced father, positioned himself as someone who called my ideas “dangerous for the soul” at the same time he was emotionally manipulating women within the loose confines of his non-Ben-Op online community. Again, do not believe that you can create a structure that will guarantee protection from guys like that. The best you can do is make your odds better, but also prepare yourself not to lose faith when overturning rocks exposes snakes.

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31 Responses to Sick Pilgrim’s Regress

This whole business is starting to get me steamed in the exact opposite of the way Rod is. We are not talking about children here. This lunacy of men having to wear chastity belts will stop. It has been a long time since I wrote a book on mind control but it seems to be time for me to write one on mind control and seduction.

The business of promising marriage is going a bit far to just get laid. No woman is worth that. Long range hypnosis works much better. He should have read my books. I cover the process in some detail (which will make writing the new one easier).

Other than that, the Cosimanian Orthodox response is, “And your problem with that is?” Power is to be used. Only thing is this case there was no power at all. To say that there was some sort of power relationship is a figment of the imagination.

In any event, it is time for men to say, “We don’t like your new rules, we are not going to follow your new rules and God help anyone who tries to make us.”

Please read the victims’ official statements here. I’d also like to note that the Sick Pilgrim community dealt with this situation exactly in the way you claimed a “Ben Op” community should: “swiftly and with justice” to protect the vulnerable.

Our dark nature is best kept hidden, or is it? When others are hurt by our lusts and temptations and striving whether it be for domination or the predominance of instinctive drives it begins to surface. When exposed others have already been hurt. When submerged others are being hurt with no surcease and no redress.

On the other side of the equation faux exposure appears real and tragically genuine when it is the machinations of the other’s dark side. In an age of witch hunts and sensationalized media exposes, the audience often presides as judge and jury as though witnesses to the alleged folly. This has been the bane of humanity from perhaps time immemorial. In our own times there was the Red Scare and later the McCarthy hearings (HUAC) and then in the 1980s childcare providers were unjustly accused of horrendous crimes losing their careers and spending time in prison later to be exonerated. Convincing as today’s accusations are, we will have to sift through them as time goes by to determine what was unfortunately and tragically true from that which is false.

At present few if any of us can even fathom such a possibility. Hence, if this gets published I expect a clear but perhaps vituperative condemnation of what has been said in this response. And there might be responses here which will accuse the author of this comment for sweeping abuse under the rug and ignoring the anguished cries of its victims. Such is not the case in this plea for balance.

Here is where we stand in agreement: When one flaunts his or her faith, said individual is scrutinized or should be tethered to the slide under the proverbial microscope.

Thick communities. I like this way of putting it. Christians have done this over and over again. Reading now about the Maronite Church. But isolation even partial isolation is what is extremely hard to achieve.

I know you probably did not intend this piece to have the whiff of Schadenfreude it exudes. I didn’t know about the man’s objections to your book; and I didn’t need to know about his problems.

[NFR: No Schadenfreude here. None. I do think it’s important to observe that a guy who holds himself out as an exemplar of how to be a proper Christian, not like those “dangerous” Benedict Option people, used therapeutic religious language to seduce and exploit women he was teaching to look down on people like me as “dangerous” to Christianity. The devil has a thousand faces. — RD]

Perhaps he meant to say “dangerous for my livelihood” as this seems to be the common thread among the most off-the-mark critics of the Benedict Option (besides having not read the book). There is among these folks the common bond of reaping the fruits of an outfaced ministry. These bloggers, famous writers of theology and big-name pastors all have in common one thing: a public face that they don’t want to lose or don’t realize is blinding them from seeing what’s really going on.

I attend one of those outward-facing churches and while I don’t think our senior pastor was ever caught up in the fame aspect, I think until recently he couldn’t see his church’s precarious foundation because the public acclaim for his sermons and books gave the impression he was on the right track.

“We must risk our children as we teach them to engage with sinners like themselves for the sake of the redemption of the world.” A sick pilgrim indeed. Putting ideology above the well being of actual people. This is why I distrust and avoid ideologues of all stripes.

‘“It is a serious thing … to remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)’

Very impressive sentiment and very astute of her to quote it, whether it has any ‘objective’ metaphysical validity or is just grandiose wishful thinking on the part of some (including perhaps, in whatever case, the doubtlessly sincere Lewis) alas remains the question, to wit, remains a matter of pure religious faith–and of what faith, no truly, is it kabbalistic, is it Christian, is it Koranic, is it voodooistic, etc. Because it seems to be offering something very grand, very powerful, very creative, but also potentially very terrible, very paradoxical, very destructive, (indeed, in some dimensional sense, the very destruction of the world).

And if these formidable and fearsome qualities apply to the billions of human beings presently on earth well that is in some fashion momentous, mysterious–to be sure–but also quite monstrous!

Once a ‘wheel of betrayal’ or even just pseudo-betrayal (the intense feeling of such) is set in motion, who and how many will it have crushed before it comes to rest or is dashed upon some rocks, which, who knows, could eventually be the entire Earth itself!

Perhaps the entirety of humanity is that very wheel, crushing itself, multiplying its anguish and its vengeance as it does, having originally been set in motion millennia ago, having circled the world countless-over-countless times already, leaving no spirit unscathed, uniting all under its pummeling force, and becoming now, in present times, ever more literalized but likewise ‘self-aware’so to say. Vide quite current and recent mass terroristic patterns that follow in many cases no known generalizable ‘code’ outside that of only a posteriori-knowable patterns of unreason, when it is necessarily and ineluctably too late.

The a priori pattern according to Lewisian logic would be supremely spiritual but also quite mechanistic: Immortals walk the earth, and when they are direly offended they may wish, as is concomitant/commensurate with their literal nature and stature, to immortalize their offense, their ire, their suffering, upon the psyche of their betrayer, but when this is unobtainable then upon tenfold that number of innocents does the crushing ‘vengeance’ or rather hideous malfeasance seem to fall–is this not after all the purpose of ancient religious courts, a la the Koranic, to sagely and intuitively (‘naturally’) sate the “immortal,” the supposedly divinely-endowed forces of an immortal’s vengeance, who would, if offended enough, righteously eternalize his rage by materially vanishing–what is in any case (so Lewis avers)–an a priori illusory and evanescent world of accumulated shadows, sin, and suffering.

All penumbras within balanced externally on the solipsistic tip of an immortal’s forbearance, sufferance, patience, and mercy–but mercy and leniency, oh great paradox, towards what, if not other equally powerful and repercussive immortals (perhaps these latter are not self-aware enough of the immensity of their power because they have ironically not yet been so sufficiently, intolerably offended)?!

Well, that’s interesting. I met Jonathan Ryan a couple of years ago at a writers’ conference hosted by a Christian college. We chatted in the booksellers’ room, where he was presiding over a table. Several things about this conversation seemed a bit off to me. After many years of experience, it sets off a warning signal in my mind when a man tells me he’s divorced, complains of not getting to see his children, and manages to throw shade on the mother of those children, all long before there’s any reason I would care. Let me make it clear that I’m not implying he was hitting on me. I’m old enough to be his mother and I doubt he had any such designs. It was more that he always positioned himself in this way—a hell of nice guy, a hell of a wonderful, zealous Catholic convert who had been wronged by a woman—and was doing it out of sheer habit. I’ve heard this line of talk before, and I don’t like it.

Nevertheless, I bought his supernatural fantasy novels and read them. I’m interested in the intersection of religion and fantasy. I hope it’s not kicking a man when he’s down to say they were not well written. They did have some narrative drive, which is the one essential in a genre novel, so I didn’t feel they were hopeless. And yet—again, there was something off. The description and use of women as characters was, to my discerning eye, relentlessly creepy. I felt there was an element of personal revenge in the placement of certain plot events. He’d said he was interested in my comments. But I’ve found that when you have some basic questions that go to the root of the concept and are unavoidably personal, people lose interest fast. When it got right down to it, I didn’t want to talk to him again. His conversation and his writing left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m disturbed but not surprised to learn that I was not wrong.

Here’s what does surprise me: A priest—Ryan’s employer and presumably his pastor—was present, drinking whiskey with Ryan, when Ryan’s co-author, Jessica Griffith, arrived at Ryan’s home. She was distraught, exhausted, and hadn’t eaten. The priest watched Ryan feed her two whiskeys, and then—what? Apparently just went home, leaving an incapacitated young woman with Ryan, and saying nothing, doing nothing, to try to help her. Griffith says she awoke to find Ryan assaulting her. Wouldn’t you think a priest would intervene in some way? He might, for instance, have suggested they fix Griffith a sandwich rather than a second whiskey. He might have asked Griffith if he could help her get home, or call a friend. But he didn’t bother. By and large, men don’t protect women. They protect each other. Being a priest doesn’t change that, and it’s stupid for me still to be surprised by that. But I still am.

Talking about an issue relevant to Christians is certainly a worthy topic for you. Doing so in the context of Ryan being critical of your BenOp was a mistake, IMO. It makes the post come off as a post made with a bit of revenge in mind, whether intended or not. I don’t think there’s any schadenfreude, as one poster felt, I just think that part of the post comes off as rather petty. You could have made all of your points without beginning this piece without tying it (via Ryan’s BenOp criticisms) to the BenOp. And, again IMO, it would have been more meaningful that way.

[NFR: Maybe I should take it down. I don’t want to be seen as gloating. I only knew about Ryan because of his (rather ridiculous) criticism of my work. — RD]

Sheesh, they apparently didn’t call it “Sick Pilgrim” for nothing. Unfortunately, there’s probably nothing more dangerous to mind and soul than mixing mental vulnerability and a religious quest. Ryan Weyer seems to have been in it for the sex. That’s bad. But it could even be worse. Psychologically wounded people are easily led. I’m thinking of Jonestown. When will we ever learn?

I wonder if stuff like this is why churches don’t encourage close friendships among their members.

I attended a campus church in my youth, and by and by a young man who was not a student began to attend. He came along on one evening event, and at one point he and I fell behind the group in the darkness. I never forgot the look of relief on the pastor’s face when we reappeared.

It made me realize that religious groups have the responsibility of creating a safe space for their members – and that if they fail to do so, the consequences can be catastrophic for the group as well as the individuals involved.

This particular group did, as you say, set a good example by immediate and effective action – but they apparently did not set a good example of establishing structures to avoid such abuse in the first place. Sometimes I get too caught up in the image of glorious fellowship to remember that there also has to be somebody watching in the background.

Rod, I think the reason many readers are misunderstaning your intentiion is that the first four paragraphs of this post are entirely about Ryan/Weyer’s criticism of the Benedict Option. If the purpose of this post is to emphasize that predatory behavior can exist in many different religious and para-church settings, these four paragraphs are completely irrelevant.

I’m not a journalist, so correct me if I’m wrong — but isn’t the lede of an article supposed to set the stage for the article’s main point? The first four paragraphs give the impression that your main point has to do with this guy’s opposition to the BenOp, which led me (a regular reader) to expect you to follow them with a rebuttal of his criticism. Yet after a one-word transition (“Well.”) the post is suddenly about this guy’s moral failings.

Thus it’s not unreasonable to read this post as an ad hominem argument: “Ryan/Weyer criticized the BenOp; Ryan/Weyer is a sleaze; therefore his criticisms are invalid.”

An alternative (Schadenfreude) reading is: “Ryan/Weyer criticized the BenOp; Ryan/Weyer is a sleaze; I gloat!” Some other commenters seem to take the post in this way, but I took it in the former way.

In response to one commenter, you stated, “Maybe I should take it down.” It’s your blog. But my personal view is that if a blogger posts something bad, they have three options: double down in the comments section; apologize; or delete the post (a non-apology apology). I have no idea whether you have anything to apologize for, but if you don’t, don’t take it down; and if you do, then deleting it is hardly an apology.

So, how can the Benedict Option be a force toward the protection of the weak and the vulnerable?

[NFR: Why would you expect it to be? That’s not it’s goal. People should protect the weak and the vulnerable because that’s what decent people do. There will never be a system strong enough to guarantee no exploitation. The price of liberty (free will) is eternal vigilance. — RD]

So, how can the Benedict Option be a force toward the protection of the weak and the vulnerable?

[NFR: Why would you expect it to be? That’s not it’s goal. People should protect the weak and the vulnerable because that’s what decent people do. There will never be a system strong enough to guarantee no exploitation. The price of liberty (free will) is eternal vigilance. — RD]

Well, first off, give me some credit to not think that anyone could guarantee no exploitation, ever.
That said, if you want a cohesive community, there will have to be in place a mechanism that allows people to live together without always feeling like they have to look over their shoulders and second guess your neighbor’s motives, i.e., eternal vigilance. There comes a point in the Benedict Option, for it to actually be the Benedict Option, where the members of the community are going to have to trust one another.

Can a BenOp community ask the individual to adhere to Mike Pence/Billy Graham policy? Can they ask males of various ages to limit their contact to single women to specific scenarios? (Just some examples. Sorry to seem so down on men….)

In other words, can a BenOp community – especially in the United States – ask its members to go above and beyond the small-o orthodox Christian, Biblical standard of no sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman?

If the BenOp is to be countercultural, this is one area that needs it badly. I like the idea of rules that have a big ask to be a part of the community. Especially if the community is willing to welcome in… the stranger. I wouldn’t think of such rules so much as a power play, but rather as a shibboleth – a way to tell if the unknown parties are there for the purpose of the community, or if they’re there simply because members of the community are perceived as naïve and easy targets.

So if a community has a rule that unrelated men should not be alone with females of any age, and this is adequately communicated to the community, a 27-year-old guy repeatedly buttonholing a 14-year-old girls is going to get noticed and remarked on sooner rather than later. Chances are, if it’s remarked on enough, he’s not going to stick around. Or, if he doesn’t leave, you have a specific, yet not horrifically escalated reason for disinviting him.

I’m not suggesting that vigilance be turned off altogether, but I think one of the reasons society inside the Church and out lack cohesiveness is because there is no mechanism for building any kind of trust. The Sexual Revolution has burned up any capital we might have had there. But if a community can see someone being faithful to the entire community over time, and being willing to let go of some of the “perks” of modern society in order to be a part of that community, that can give the community members a chance to “breathe.”

The gloating tone of your article was disgusting. I’m not sure if you are aware that you are peddling at least TWO victims of sexual assault in order to increase your book sales and pat yourself on the back and rejoicing in the fact that someone who criticised you (and who clearly hurt you ego), has been “taken down.”
This article was disgusting to me and makes me suspicious of your Benedict Option. Since clearly you are judging Sick Pilgrim on Jonathan Ryan, I should judge the Benedict Option on you. To exploit someone’s suffering to increase your book sales isn’t just un-Christian, it is despicable. So, should I judge the Benedict Option in this same light you judged Sick Piligrim in this article? Ignoring the suffering of the victims as long as you can USE them to increase the sales of your books?

[NFR: Oh, please. I hardly even know who Ryan was. I’ve been criticized by much bigger names than his, and my ego is just fine. My book has been selling very well, and I don’t need to “exploit” anybody. I would have written about Ryan anyway because it’s a big deal when someone in the Christian blogosphere is caught doing things like that, but I believe there’s a meaningful lesson here. Ryan criticizes my ideas for being “dangerous” to Christians because in his view, it makes them suspicious of others, and less willing to be vulnerable. And it turns out he’s an alleged psycho who preyed on women who made themselves vulnerable to him in their own brokenness. Anyway, I’m not judging Sick Pilgrim, which is one of the victims of Jonathan Ryan, whom I am judging here. Which you would know if you had read with a modicum of attention before taking to the keyboard to splutter a response. — RD]

Can a BenOp community ask the individual to adhere to Mike Pence/Billy Graham policy? Can they ask males of various ages to limit their contact to single women to specific scenarios? (Just some examples. Sorry to seem so down on men….)”…….

I love this idea. It keeps everything above board. It is not hard either. I am 35 and divorced and a women I am highly attracted to a woman who is 37 and never married. We run in the same circles and it is obvious she is into me also. I never plan to date again and she knows this. So to always keep things safe and above board I Have never been one on one with her even in public, I don’t text her at all unless in a group text about something, I have never ridden alone with her, or anything else like that. The most time alone with her has been when we were the first two at chess club for ten minutes at the local coffee shop so even then we were not alone.

It is entirely possible for single men and women to be friends but never be alone together. I actually advocate it

Seems like the internet, and specifically a substratum of the Facebook environment, was doing much of the thinking for the parties involved, towards clearly no good end, professionally, relationally, and romantically.

More specifically, it seems that even though Jonathan Ryan was obviously a victimizer, as well as an emotional gaslighter, of women, he had himself become a sort of psychological (one might even say spiritual) victim of the various anti-ethical and human-exploitative structural dynamics, to an algorithmic degree, that not only abound, but seem to veritably constitute the internet, grosso modo, as a whole. E.g. he appears to have been in the first stages of the process of making a pattern of ‘consuming,’ or rather volatilizing, relationships with women at something roughly approaching the speed of the internet itself, it’s as though his very psychology, contrary to all professed professional and personal tenets and identities, had become surreally possessed by the capitalist, superficialist, consummatory ‘genius’ of the internet as it presently has been excruciatingly deliberately designed to be.

As a self-professed “pilgrim,” the influence of the internet, its concrete instrumentality in this particular case, too became his cross, yet he still remained too blinded by prior states to respond to his peccant condition in the manner of the ‘good thief’ when the dilemmic opportunity arose.

This story was horrible obviously but I’m glad you started it with the BenOp stuff because it made me frame this horrid story and horrid man with that mindset.

I was watching a documentary about the middle ages today and, while I knew this before, the way it was put in the video “brought it to life” for me – people in the middle ages had no privacy. Virtually none at all, regardless of whether they were wealthy or poor. It made me think about the drop in privacy we have had with the rise of smartphones.

I have no doubt that sexual abuse happened back then but it would have been much harder in some ways, especially with the privacy issue.

Anyway, with the BenOp, you certainly can’t guarantee that people won’t be abused. I do hope you can come up with some devices that make it harder to hide. I wonder if you have given thought to how to unmarried adults would be accommodated in the community? Would encouraging roommates be helpful or harmful?

I do think the Boy Scouts have a pretty good model for both protecting the boys and protecting leaders from false accusations which could provide some ideas, especially when it comes to protecting kids.

What a world. I hope you at least get to have a BenOp community for yourself and your family. Thank you for the anchor while I read all that stuff.

It’s a complex question… how to protect vulnerable women from predators like this guy? At least there’s no pedophilia, and the organization promptly cleaned him out, I’m glad to hear it.

On the organizational level, I would strongly suggest that all leaders be required to study and understand the psychology and tactics of sexual predators – because they aren’t the majority of humans or even men (#NotAllMen – seriously!), but those that exist search out circles like Sick Pilgrim in a clockwork fashion. “A space for the spiritually sick” = a place where people who have had travail and abuse in their past, but are still eagerly – desperately? – searching for purity, truth and community in their future have gathered. Many of these will be women. The background of both the attendees and the structure of the organization, thanks to its background in Catholicism, is authoritarian and male-power-oriented. It’s like a pond stocked with trout for those who intend to further abuse.

Maybe it’s obvious to state, but women who have been abused in their past are incredibly easy to abuse in the present – whatever method their evil parents and guardians laid down in their young minds will usually still work to bend them to the will of future abusers, and successful predators tend to be emotionally intelligent and easily able to intuit and copy these mechanisms once they find a mark. It leads to a gray area and much frustration among those trying to help them, because it can indeed seem like the victims are as dumb as rocks from the outside, and willingly throwing themselves into bad situations.

A bit more mercy, though, and you can see that they are trapped in a near-impossible situation – the only way they have ever experienced love was inextricably entwined with evil. To extricate themselves from the web and get one without the other requires YEARS AND YEARS of intensive therapy, brutal self-honesty and a significant dose of luck… or a hard, bitter road of acknowledging that healthy romantic relationships are not within their grasp, and as such they must avoid them… perhaps for the rest of their lives. Most will just be victimized over and over again, because rewriting your core adaptations is hard and who wants to live without even the *hope* of love?

Anyway, TL;DR, organizations like Sick Pilgrim (and the BenOp?) should keep a sharp eye out for the type of man who is coming to “fish” and arrange social checks and interventions as part of membership to keep things above board; on the individual level, women who have abusive pasts must accept that they will never be “normal” and have iron standards in place for any man that courts them – they must understand that what initially feels like comfort and love is almost certainly evil, and treat it accordingly. That ought to fix the problem. No big deal right??

I really appreciate kijunshi’s comment as it helps me understand the situation better for the abuse it entailed. I support and applaud the women who came forward about the abuse, and I can’t imagine how much courage that would take. The guy sounds like scum, and I’m glad he’s been outed. At the same time, as a mother, I struggle to understand why a newly single mom with at three year old is dating at all, much less getting involved with a divorced man with three kids of his own, and why she thinks talking marriage with someone she just met isn’t bash*t crazy. Kijunshi’s comment helped, particularly this paragraph:

“A bit more mercy, though, and you can see that they are trapped in a near-impossible situation – the only way they have ever experienced love was inextricably entwined with evil. To extricate themselves from the web and get one without the other requires YEARS AND YEARS of intensive therapy, brutal self-honesty and a significant dose of luck… or a hard, bitter road of acknowledging that healthy romantic relationships are not within their grasp, and as such they must avoid them… perhaps for the rest of their lives. Most will just be victimized over and over again, because rewriting your core adaptations is hard and who wants to live without even the *hope* of love?”

Finally: I appreciate Rod’s posting this, but I find his intro incredibly tone-deaf. Why are you making this about you and the BenOp? Make those comments an addendum if you must, but don’t lead with them if you don’t want to sound like you’re gloating.

Whoa. I attended the Trying to Save God conference Sick Pilgrim gave this summer. (It was awesome, btw!!) One thing that sticks out in my mind was at one of the talks, John Ryan put a heavy emphasis on the whole “know that you’re bad without God” angle, emphasizing our sin and badness and our need to own that badness. Not at all saying there’s not truth to that, but I remember his comments just feeling much darker than the other presenter (Rebecca Bratten Weiss, a total badass) and they didn’t seem to achieve much clarity on anything.

As a newcomer (returner) back to the Church, I chalked his dark comments up to normal Catholic guilt stuff — and maybe it’s inaccurate to say they aren’t — but the contrast between his attitude and Rebecca’s was very noticeable and, in (admittedly biased now) hindsight, they come off more as deep self-loathing than as shining a light on anything true. I have to think these harmful relationships were at least one part of what was driving that darkness.

All that said, I’m not giving up on Sick Pilgrim. Jessica Griffith is great from what I can tell, and a very talented writer. If anything I like/respect SP even more now since they were willing to kick Ryan out.